Chicken thighs are amazing on the grill. I marinate them in garlic, fresh ginger, soy sauce, honey, and sesame oil.
Pork shoulder (also called boston butt) or any cheap large beef roast in the crockpot with just some sliced sweet onions, salt and pepper. Cook it until it shreds, stir it up and let it cook a little longer. It makes a huge amount of food, but freezes well so then we have food for a long time. I serve it over something - rice, cous-cous, mashed poatatoes, or with a couple vegetable sides.
We did a Beans & Rice week once, where we tried a ton of different recipes based around beans and rice, though we weren't strict on the rice part. You can actually get amazing variety. We only made it to 6, but I had more recipes saved up.
1) Mexican style pintos, as part of burrito bowls
2) French White-bean Cassoulet (though we skipped the rice and did bread instead)
3) Channa Masala (Indian style chickpeas) over rice
4) Cajun red beans & rice
5) Indian style lentils over rice
6) Baked beans with cornbread
Learn to make bread. It costs me from 0.25-0.75/loaf depending on whether it's a basic flour/salt/yeast recipe, or a sandwich bread with honey and milk. The easiest is Jim Lahey's No-Knead bread. That's my standby, and I'll usually make it twice a week. Cornbread is a quick bread and very easy. (Oops, sorry, just read the thing about no gluten. I'll leave this for anyone else though).
Soup is about as cheap as it gets for food. We make a lot of pureed vegetables soups (boil broth and any random veggies you want until soft, then puree. You can dollop some butter on top, usually needs a fair bit of salt and pepper). It often has a potato base, but the variety is endless. In the summer, I make a zucchini-ginger one that I found on another site. I've used up radish leaves, odds and ends of wilting vegetables, sweet potatoes, turnips, parsnips, celery root, yellow squash, carrots, spinach, and who knows what else.
